Sundance broke out Dee Rees’ post-World War II epic “Mudbound,” a script of sweeping ambition and detail adapted by Rees and Virgil Williams from the Hilary Jordan novel. Netflix picked up the movie for the Sundance 2017 record of $12.5 million, booked it at fall film festivals and mounted a full-on Oscar campaign, despite a limited theatrical day-and-date November 17 release. It landed a WGA nomination.

Also rising to instant Oscar contention was Luca Guadagnino’s “Call Me By Your Name,” an elegiac summer love story written by Oscar-nominated director James Ivory (“Remains of the Day,” “A Room with a View,” and “Howards End”). Set in Italy, the old-fashioned romance is between a vacationing teenager (Timothee Chalamet) and his professor father’s researcher (Armie Hammer). Sony Pictures Classics took the critics’ darling to the fall festivals to continued acclaim. It won both the USC Libraries Scripter Award as well as the WGA, which puts it at the front of the pack for the Oscar.

“Molly’s Game”

Courtesy of STXfilms

With global blockbuster “Logan,” Scott Frank and director James Mangold crafted a last Wolverine movie for Hugh Jackman and Patrick Stewart as an emotionally moving, human-scale family drama; the Writers Guild awarded the script a nomination. Also landing WGA nod was Oscar perennial Aaron Sorkin’s adaptation of skier-turned-poker-wrangler Molly Bloom’s bestseller “Molly’s Game” for his entertaining directorial debut, as well as Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber’s inside-showbiz comedy “The Disaster Artist.”